The End of Eve (23 page)

“Normally a patient might go from soft foods to liquids. Then she might start refusing food all together. That would tell us she had just a few days. But your mother has graduated from soft foods to complex solid foods, and ...” she bit her lip. “The bedsore is beginning to heal.”

“That's good, right?”

The hospice nurse nodded. “It's unbelievable.”

I popped a piece of spicy chocolate into my mouth. I believed it. With all the marijuana Leslie's ex was feeding her and the chef's food-why wouldn't we get a miracle?

THE CHEF WAS
in my mother's kitchen making miso soup for the week when another prospective caregiver knocked on the open door.

We didn't usually interview caregivers. Milagro Home Care just sent them over and I wrote the checks. But this one, Sherman, said he had some questions for us.

“Sure,” I said. “Come in.”

He wore a zebra-print jacket and white leather boots, smelled like cigarettes. “Well,” he puckered. “I have some needs. I'm wondering if I can bring my two poodles with me.”

It occurred to me that Leslie or Maia had somehow had this guy sent over from Central Casting, that we were being punked.

“Poodles?”

“Yes, you know, I used to be a poodle groomer? In Hollywood?” He flicked his wrist. “Can I meet your mother?”

I led him into my mother's room where she sat with Cloud. She liked Cloud, but she always called him Ocean or Storm or Mist. He didn't seem to mind. One weather-related noun was as good as the next.

“
SERIOUSLY?
”
THE CHEF
said when I stepped back into the kitchen. “Poodles?”

I dialed Milagro Home Care, said we could do without Sherman and his needs, but after he'd left my mother shrieked, “How could you send him away? He's a Hollywood hairdresser. He's going to do my hair!”

“He's a poodle groomer, Mom. It's different.”

She glared at me. “I want Sherman.”

So I dialed again, told the scheduler I'd misspoken. We wanted Sherman after all. We wanted Sherman, poodles and all.

31.

My Mother's Memoir

“
I KNOW WHERE I WAS BORN.
”
MY MOTHER SAT IN BED
with her laptop and cried, kept crying. “I was born at Cedars-Sinai Hospital on November tenth, nineteen forty one. I know where I was born.”

I'd closed her bedroom door behind me, but the poodles whined and scratched at the door. “Of course you know where you were born, Mom.” I lifted the computer from her lap, sat down in the chair next to her bed.

She'd forgotten her email password again and this was the security question.
In which hospital were you born?
I tried every variation I could think of:
Cedars-Sinai, Cedars Sinai
without the dash,
Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Her shoulders shook as she cried. “I know where I was born.”

I Googled “other names for Cedars-Sinai,” scrolled through the Wikipedia article. In 1941, Cedars-Sinai was called Cedars of Lebanon. “Cedars of Lebanon?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she wept now, her whole body convulsing. “That's what I said. I was born at Cedars of Lebanon.”

“Of course you were.” I typed it in,
Cedars of Lebanon
, reset the fucking password. “We got it. It's all right.”

In a few minutes her breath began to steady. “I was born at Cedars of Lebanon on November tenth, nineteen forty one.”

AS MY MOTHER
checked her email, I sat watching the wall, scrolled through the to-do list in my mind. All the work I had to catch up on. My online class. My ghostwriting deadline.

WHEN I WAS
a little girl I wanted nothing more than my mother's attention. My beautiful mother. But she had more important people and things to attend to. Now I sat with her dying, sat steeped in boredom.

MY MOTHER PRESSED
her morphine pump, looked up from her computer. “Did you bring me a book about writing memoir or did I dream it?”

“I think you dreamed it.”

“You teach memoir writing, don't you?”

I nodded. “Yes. That's what I do.”

She half-closed her eyes, pushed the morphine button again. “Do you think memoir writing is a way to express anger or a way to pay tribute?”

I'd never thought about it in those terms. “Maybe both,” I said.

My mother nodded. “At what age do people discover philosophy?”

I thought about that. “Around fourteen?” I guessed. “That first crisis of meaning. Younger if they're abused.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Were you abused?”

I rubbed my forehead. “Sometimes I think of it that way.”

“
I
was abused,” she said.

“I know.” I picked up her sippy cup of water for her.

“Can I tell you a story, Tiniest? For my memoir? I'm too tired to type.”

“Sure.” I took the laptop from her. “I can type it.”

So my mother told me a story.

“ONCE UPON
A time, Tiniest,” my mother started. She gazed up at her crow painting on the far wall. “A little girl went missing.” She swallowed. “That's how you start a story, isn't it, Tiniest?”

“Sure,” I said.

And she coughed. “It was the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing. Of missing children. I was seven years old and we lived in G. I. housing in the Pacific Palisades. On Temecula Avenue. Almost all the houses had the same floor plan. For years I could still remember that little girl's name, but I've forgotten it now. She was the same age as me. Search parties went out looking for her.”

My mother shifted, looked out the window. “I was terrified the little girl had fallen into one of the open trenches in the neighborhood – they were everywhere, the trenches dug for the sewer pipes. It was scary to look into those trenches. They were deep and narrow and muddy.”

My mother pressed her morphine button. “There were incinerators in people's backyards. We burned our own trash in those days. Everything that could be burned. My father was just back from the war – he'd been a pilot, his plane downed in the South Pacific, he'd been a POW – and now he'd cram the incinerator full and he'd throw in burning kindling and pretty soon his fire raged and raged in its concrete container and he'd pick me up in his thick hands and he'd hold me over that roaring fire and he'd say, “You want to go in there, Evie?” and he'd motion to throw me in.

“I screamed and clung to him, but I was so scared, the “no” hardly came out. Madre couldn't hear me. I knew she couldn't hear me. I only had the person who would throw me into the fire to cling to. I understood that.”

My mother didn't cry or smile as she told me her story, just kept watching her crow, pushing the morphine button.

I'd read someplace that it takes four generations to recover from war. By this math, and assuming no further deployments, Maia and Maxito's children might be free.

My mother coughed. “One day they found the body of the little girl who'd been missing. They found her in one of those deep muddy ditches. She'd fallen in and died. I wish I could tell you her name.”

The hiss of the oxygen tank.

“That's sad,” I said.

But my mother shook her head, scolded me: “It's more than sad, Tiniest. It's a lie. I spent my whole childhood terrified of those trenches, of falling, but that little girl didn't fall. Little what-ever-her-name-was. Someone murdered her, obviously, and they disposed of her body, just threw her into the sewer. Evil doesn't just happen, Tiniest. People don't just fall into the earth like that. Evil is what we do to each other.” She closed her eyes. “It's what we do.”

I sat there at her bedside, watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed through her oxygen tube. I sat there until I knew she was asleep. And then I crept out, quiet as I could, the way you do when you've just put a baby down.

I SAT AT
the medicine desk we'd set up in the laundry room, wrote checks to the caregivers. We couldn't afford the 2,4-7 help forever. Abra had suggested giving notice on our little adobe outside of town, the two of us and Maxito moving back in to the former duplex. My mother said she liked that idea. She wanted us here with her. But I wasn't ready for this house to be the only home I had.

I took my mother's car keys from a basket on the kitchen counter, poked my head into her room. “Mind if I sell the Prius?”

She smiled weakly, resigned to it. “Sure,” she said. “Don't get ripped off.”

The Prius would buy us another month of caregivers.

THAT NIGHT I
sat on the porch of my old adobe, cracked open a State Pen Porter. My phone buzzed. My mother's landline.

“Tiniest,” she whispered. “You have to fire Sherman.”

“All right,” I said. “Any particular reason?” I sipped my beer, imaged he'd done her hair up like a poodle's.

But my mother sounded stricken. “He found my morphine stash, Tiniest. I had enough to end this. Sherman told on me. They took it. Who does that? He told on me.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, and knocked back the rest of my beer. “Consider him fired.”

I didn't have Maxito that night, so I curled onto my bedroll with a copy of
Rose: Love in Violent Times.
Maybe all times were violent times.

“
CAN THE LAST
part of my memoir be a screenplay?” my mother asked as soon as I stepped into her room the next day. She'd been pushing her morphine pump twice as much as usual, according to the log, but the thing had its programmed limit.

My mother's memoir seemed a harmless enough project, but a part of me felt like a cad for humoring her. We only had a few pages so far. There would be no book, no movie. Still, I said, “a screenplay? Sure.”

She smiled. “Not too unconventional?”

“I think it could be interesting,” I said. “Multimedia.”

Cloud brought my mother a cup of herbal tea, set it on her bedside table.

Her hand shook as she lifted the cup, but she took a sip. “What do you know about trauma, Ariel?”

This was one of those questions my mother often asked me, not because she wanted to hear what I knew about trauma from my own experience, but rather she wanted to be sure I'd been listening to her all my life, that I'd been learning these things she considered imperative.

There were right and wrong answers to questions like this one.

Eve-family pop quiz.

I knew from trauma, knew from being kicked in the ribs when I'd expected a lover's tenderness, knew from standing in
front of a family court judge waiting for the decree that would tell me whether or not I was fit to be a mother. But I also knew that the correct answer now was something more academic. “ Trauma,” I said, “by its very definition, can't be fully experienced in the moment. Due to the suddenness or the enormity of the traumatic event, we just can't take it in. So we have to go back to it at some point – either literally or symbolically – to integrate whatever happened. We can do that consciously, in some safe way, or we're destined to revisit the trauma over and over again as the violence of life.”

My mother nodded. This was the right answer. “What do you know about abuse, Ariel?”
Pop quiz question number two.

I knew something about abuse, too, knew sexual violence and jagged steel keys bashing into a naked forehead. I knew words chosen solely to make a person feel worthless and crazy. But I knew the answer to this question, too. “Abuse needs a witness,” I said, “either in the immediate present moment or revisited later – like in some kind of therapy or confessional – if there's to be any hope of healing.”

My mother nodded. I was two for two. “What do you know about evil, Tiniest?”

I didn't answer. I had some ideas about evil. And I knew she wanted me to tell her about Bobbie Harris back at San Quentin. About the way he was beaten out of the womb. About the way he killed those boys, but that's not what got him the death penalty. About the way he ate their leftover hamburgers after he shot them. About that's what made him cold blooded. But I stayed silent. I was getting tired of this game.

My mother gazed out the window, looked so sad. “John died all wrong,” she said.

John. My stepdad. The priest. The one she killed unless they were in on it together.

“What do you mean all wrong?”

She was quiet for a long time. “We talked about it,” she finally said, “but when I gave him the poison it was all wrong. I
didn't feel anything. I should have taken the poison too. I should have lain down with him and died. But I just gave him the poison. I went into the living room and I turned on the TV and watched Anderson Cooper. Just like some cold-blooded killer.”